Tring~♬ ta-ra-rang~♪ ta-dang~♬ ta-ra~♬

Monday morning.

An Jongwuk, leaning back in a leather chair in the wide principal’s office, letting the time run past him at his leisure.

A classical violin piece, one of the ones he likes, and he was taking the old age of a man whole.

He comes in grateful that at his age there is still work like this to do.

Forty years of it, and An Jongwuk has held out through all of them.

He began teaching in Cheonghwa’s earliest days.

Took his degree in Korean language education at Seoguk and picked up his first post here.

He was born on an island in South Gyeongsang, so a life like this one counts as a large success.

Decades of teaching spent at Cheonghwa, and the result is that he can live at an easy pace now, on the room the post gives him.

Privately, he has two flats inside a Gangnam redevelopment zone.

Bought on a listing a Cheonghwa parent quietly recommended to him, back when he was teaching in earnest.

He made up his mind and took a loan to do it, and now they have turned into golden eggs.

The value alone has gone up more than tenfold.

There is no worry about living.

Not long ago he pulled down the house his parents lived in at home, widened the plot and put up a villa.

Once he retires he can pass the dusk of a life at the fishing he enjoyed as a boy.

His children got good positions too, on the connections he made at Cheonghwa.

The severance is generous, and split into a pension rather than taken in one, living costs are no trouble either.

Cheonghwa’s own culture of gratuities — of bribes, rather — which has never gone away and is kept up behind everything.

The sums are too large for the word gratuity.

Sit in the principal’s chair especially, and a single letter of recommendation puts serious money in the hand.

A Cheonghwa principal’s letter works as a safe-passage card into most universities, Seoguk included.

So the parents of any pupil who has kept his results respectable go about with fire in their eyes.

What he has taken in that way alone runs well past a billion won.

All of it buried in overseas shares, of course.

A method a pupil he saw through to graduation told him about, specially.

“Without incident…… serve the term out without incident and retire properly.”

These days An Jongwuk prays daily for the school’s peace, in worse condition than a soldier counting down his last weeks.

“Even now, thinking about that moment makes my head go.”

The business of a few weeks ago came back to him.

A small friction with a charity case — with Haryun Group’s hidden young master, rather.

Had money not settled it, he would have gone out of the door in disgrace over it.

Shff.

The violin piece finished and An Jongwuk got up.

He carried the coffee cup with him.

At the window he looked over the beautiful view of a school going through May.

It is the routine repeated every day he comes in.

Cheonghwa is set on the yolk of the land, in the middle of Gangnam.

Nothing round it, no building and no place, carries the same presence.

Old trees of every kind, and grounds so quiet you cannot believe they are in a city centre——

“Hm??”

The colour in Principal An Jongwuk’s face set where it was.

Something about the grounds was not as it usually is.

The lessons are about to start.

Naturally no pupil should be moving about outside a classroom.

At most you catch sight of the sports-place boys, who cause no great trouble, drifting late toward a room.

But today there is something not ordinary in it.

Pupils moving in numbers toward the great hall.

No sound reaches him, and there is nothing usual in how excited they look.

“What on earth…… are the staff doing!”

The irritation came up in him at once.

Hold out without incident until the end of the year and he can leave with the golden key and the bouquet the foundation chairman presents.

A life lived well enough, digging at one well.

A few months left, and he does not want a single stain on it.

An ill-boding antenna went up.

The whole of the Cheonghwa grounds looked lifted and unsettled.

A current in the air he has never felt before.

At this rate something is going to go off properly today.

Knock, knock.

A knock came at the door out of nowhere.

“Come in.”

Creak.

The word was barely out and the door came open in a hurry, and somebody stepped in.

“Teacher Kim. What is it, at this hour?”

An Jongwuk was out of temper.

Kim Changyong, homeroom teacher of second year, class three, whom he does not have much occasion to see.

There is the business of a few weeks ago as well, and An Jongwuk did not hide what he felt. He looked at him coldly.

And he carries a certain prejudice against non-examined-subject teachers besides.

Coming to the principal’s office in the morning without an appointment did not please him either.

Here at Cheonghwa, a teacher whose whole posture is to conduct himself morally is a teacher who has got it wrong.

At Cheonghwa you compromise with injustice to a reasonable degree, and shut an eye, and life is easier.

“Principal! Something serious has happened!”

Kim Changyong’s face was flushed and he was worked up.

The colour in An Jongwuk’s face darkened.

Something serious?

On a fresh May Monday morning?

“Wh— what has happened? What do you mean, serious!”

The fear dropped into him.

“Teacher Lee Jangyong has raised an objection to a result and taken a pupil to the great hall.”

“Wh— what! A pupil? Which one? What result?”

An Jongwuk’s head went to pieces in an instant.

He has not had the results of these papers reported to him yet either.

Anything to do with pupils’ results is handled entirely by the vice-principal and the head of academic affairs.

Come to think of it, today is the day the midterm results go up.

Other ordinary schools do not publish them, under ministry policy. Cheonghwa publishes all of them.

This is the ground on which the final boss of a competitive society is raised.

They see the results with their own eyes, and it drives them harder.

People of the upper class compete like madmen and survive fiercely, further past what ordinary people imagine.

They know perfectly well that guarding the honour and the wealth they have piled up is not an easy thing.

They compete with a cruelty ordinary people would not dare imagine.

You need only look at the pupils here.

From outside it is a perfect environment for study. What goes on inside it is desperate past imagining.

Even the sports-place boys who smoke concentrate until their lungs are fit to burst when they train.

An Jongwuk has watched from close by, and knows their days better than anybody.

And if something has gone off over results, the retirement that has to be perfect comes to nothing.

“Principal. Have you not heard about the second year’s perfect score?”

“A perfect score? No. Second year, that would be…… Lee Jeongjun?”

The only second year with any real chance of it is Lee Jeongjun, who has not let go of first in the school.

The son his mother, the president of the parents’ association, dotes on.

What has come in from that quarter alone runs to tens of millions.

And that Lee Jeongjun has taken a perfect score.

So why is Lee Jangyong throwing himself about?

Lee Jangyong, the lunatic, who believes his own mathematics is a magnificent thing.

There is no quality in him fit for a teacher, and nothing in him to hold up as an example.

But for telling the pupils apart in mathematics he is exactly the man Cheonghwa needs.

“It isn’t Jeongjun.”

“Not Jeongjun? Then…… Lee Hyoju?”

In which case it is very much a matter for her homeroom teacher to be raising.

“Neither of them.”

“Then who on earth is it!!”

The frustration went past him and he shouted.

“It’s Tae-ung.”

“Tae-ung……? Who is th——. Hh!”

The colour went out of his face.

He had been asked, repeatedly and urgently, and he has not disclosed what Ha Tae-ung is to the staff.

Instead he issued a warning that discrimination against charity cases was strictly forbidden, and barely held a thing back from spreading.

Apart from Kim Changyong, no member of staff knows.

“Teacher Lee Jangyong is certain Tae-ung has cheated.”

“A— and so!!”

“In the great hall, in a mathematics contest——”

“That fucking son of a bitch!!”

An Jongwuk let a shout out loud enough to take the office off its foundations.

“Driving the young master as a cheat? I’ll have that bastard!!”

Tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk-tuk.

He was out of the office before Kim Changyong could stop him.

“Ah. Now…… I’ve no idea either.”

Kim Changyong watched his back go and shook his head.

And then went after him at speed.

Until very recently Ha Tae-ung was nothing but a charity case.

What he is has turned completely over.

One of this country’s royal family, and nothing a Lee Jangyong can do about it.

An ordinary Monday morning at Cheonghwa High School was wrapped in confusion.

Chaos itself, one step short of a timed device going off.

Me……!

Lee Jeongjun could not make the situation go into his head at all.

That he is standing in the middle of the uproar he cannot believe either.

Coming in this morning he thought today would confirm his first place in the year over again.

One mathematics question aside, he did not slip on a single one.

Even the third-year sunbae who left him the trauma lost marks on a mathematics question.

He took it for a gate nobody gets past, and put it off to next time.

And a charity case bastard, less than an insect, has taken mathematics — no, every subject——

He could not believe it, so, pride cut or not, he came down to the great hall to see.

Coldly considered, a leak of examination questions does not happen at Cheonghwa High School.

If it were possible, the sunbaes would have got them out, and so would he.

The papers are managed strictly, at Cheonghwa Group level.

So a charity case getting through security that thorough and securing a paper is impossible.

And the board has grown regardless of the fact.

Maths Thug grew it.

Stepping out into a mathematics contest with a charity case, over his pride——

He is not an opponent Lee Jeongjun himself would take on readily.

It cuts his pride.

But Teacher Lee Jangyong’s ability has to be acknowledged.

“If it’s too much for you, you don’t have to.”

Oh Jeonghye, who has mathematics for classes one to three, added the goad.

Snap-snap-snap.

The eyes of children crowded in like spectators drove in from every side.

Lee Jeongjun is, in name and in fact, first in the whole second year.

Give ground here and they will be whispering about it for as long as anybody remembers.

And the rumour would go right across Gangnam.

It would tangle with his mother’s own business, and spread as though it were fact.

“What do you think Lee Jeongjun will do?”

“He’s up against a charity case. Is Lee Jeongjun going to pull out and lose face?”

“Jeongjun sunbae will show them, won’t he?”

“Obviously! Do you know who Jeongjun sunbae is?”

Nearly every pupil in the school, the third years excepted, is crowded into the great hall.

They want a dramatic story. A scene out of a film with impact in it.

That bastard……

Lee Jeongjun glared at the charity case who is the root of the whole board.

Their eyes met again.

Fzz!

A short spark jumping.

And in that moment the charity case’s mouth opened a little.

“Scared?”

“……!!”

(End of Chapter 56)